The present invention relates to electronic data processing in general, and particularly to data protection.
In organizations, computer systems are used to protect many electronic documents of various types. The computer systems may be used to perform business processes. Typically, access rights of processes (e.g., business processes) or users often change over time because:
a) people change job and responsibility within an organization; or
b) an organization itself changes its processes (e.g., by process reengineering) and/or organizational structure changes; or
c) each of multiple organizations has different requirements on document access (or document security) with respect to the same type of document depending on organization-specific job descriptions and/or specific organizational structures; or
d) new documents are developed which must be easily integrated into an existing computer system without the need to develop a new access control mechanism and/or a user-specific document presentation logic for each new type of document.